Warlick, George

ORAL HISTORY OF GEORGE C. WARLICK, JR.
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
June 20, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel. Today is June the 20th, 2011 and I am in Kingston at the home of Mr. George Warlick, and thank you for taking time to speak with us. I want to start at the very beginning. Tell me about where you were born and raised and something about your family and where you went to school.
Mr. Warlick: All right. I was born in 1921, June 12th, in Hickory, North Carolina. Hickory was a small manufacturing town, fairly prosperous. As a matter of fact, I was born in a hospital in Hickory, which I have been told is not normal for a lot of people in 1921. My father was a sixth generation American. He grew up on a farm in Lincoln County, North Carolina, so I was a seventh generation. My mother was born of a cotton farmer in Cleveland County and I believe that she was seventh generation. I’m eight generation in that one. My family was well educated. My father had been a college professor before War World I interrupted his career. My mother was a college teacher in Catawba College in North Carolina. When dad got out of the army in 1919, it was springtime, and there were not many college positions opened at that time, so he was employed by a farmer supply store which he ultimately bought and operated till 1942, Second World War. It was not highly successful, but it was a fairly successful business. I grew up, of course, in the Depression, and while – my father was not highly successful, and I knew very well the depression was on, but he raised us pretty good. A family that appreciated music, arts. I was given piano lessons as an early boy and I joined the boy scouts, an Eagle Scout, and we belonged to an outstanding church. So I was given a fairly good start in life. I finished my public schools in Hickory and while I was not spectacular, I was an Honor student. We were fortunate to have a Lutheran College, Lenoir-Rhyne College, located in Hickory, so we were able to continue to go onto college living at home and not much different from high school.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Did you have brothers or sisters?
Mr. Warlick: I have two brothers and one sister. At the conclusion of my college career, which was spring of 1942, I received a scholarship from Duke University. Since I had a heart condition that kept me out of a lot of things, I was listed as 4F and so I received this scholarship from Duke. Now, my degree at Lenoir-Rhyne was in Business Administration. What I really should have been able to do was to get an MBA, a Master of Business Administration, but they did not issue them at that time, and so I got a degree in Economics, which I thought was the nearest thing to business.
Mr. McDaniel: So they didn’t offer MBAs then, nobody offered them, right?
Mr. Warlick: No. If they did, I didn’t have sense enough to ask for it.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Right.
Mr. Warlick: Well, I had a year at Duke in the graduate school. Best thing that happened there was I met the nursing student who I later married. In the spring of 1943 I knew my graduate studies were about to come to an end for several reasons and I went to the appointment’s office at Duke University, and very fine woman, Sandy Yarborough-Mitchell, ran the Appointments Office, she advised me that Tennessee Eastman in Kingsport had openings, and so she arranged and I went up to Tennessee Eastman in Kingsport and was interviewed for a job.
Mr. McDaniel: Let me stop you there for a second. The Appointments Office, I’d never heard of that. Was that like what they would call ‘placement’ now for graduates, to help them find jobs?
Mr. Warlick: But I think we called it ‘appointments’ then.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, sure.
Mr. Warlick: It’s the same thing.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s go back, before we move on to that. So your dad, you said he was a college professor, and then War World I came along, and after that he went to work at the farmer –
Mr. Warlick: No, he was in – yeah, okay, you got it.
Mr. McDaniel: And he went to work at the farmer’s store where – he eventually bought it.
Mr. Warlick: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And he had that until ’42, you said.
Mr. Warlick: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: So all through the Depression – you said that you didn’t have a lot but you had what you needed. Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah, he bought a new car every four years. We had a nice brick house. Mother always had a maid. We had telephone, two newspapers, but still I knew that there was not a lot of discretionary money available.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Now the Depression, I know it hit hard everywhere, but in Hickory and that area over there, was that like everywhere else or was it kind of immune to some of the worst parts of it?
Mr. Warlick: We came through the Depression fairly well. Some of the mills or manufacturing plants went on three-day-week, but I remember seeing trains go through town with hobos riding them. I knew the depression was on. I knew that Herbert Hoover said we were about to turn the corner, but still – Dad’s little store, he had one man to help him, and he was always able to pay the rent and pay his help, but I think there may have been years when he made nothing for himself. But unlike a lot of the businesses these days, he was not highly leveraged, so he was able to keep his nose above water and keep the store going.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess most of the mills, I know now many of the mills in that area of North Carolina do furniture, make furniture. What was the industry like then?
Mr. Warlick: Well, cotton mills were the biggest thing. There were furniture factories and hosiery.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, and that was in and around Hickory there?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah, it was on the outskirts. Hickory really expanded to take them in as time went by.
Mr. McDaniel: And is that Catawba County?
Mr. Warlick: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: I was just there a couple of months ago, as a matter of fact.
Mr. Warlick: I left there in 1942, so it has really exploded since I –
Mr. McDaniel: I went and interviewed Dr. Cuyler Dunbar, the first President of Roane State, and his wife, Sandy, and, of course, he was at Catawba Valley Community College for twenty years after he left Roane State.
Mr. Warlick: Cuyler and I were good friends –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Warlick: – when he lived here, and one time I was back in Hickory and we went to the church where I attended and the son of my scout master was still in that church and his daughter had become a minister and she was preaching that Sunday we were there, and because her father was high on the Board of the Community College, Cuyler and Sandy attended that service, so we had a chance to meet them again.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, well, good.
Mr. Warlick: And if I’m not mistaken, we had a reunion at the College a couple of years ago and Cuyler and Sandy were there. I had some time with the College, come later.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Well, they’re great people and it was a nice visit I had with them. So you came along, you graduated, you got your Masters in Economics from Duke. And so you went up to Tennessee Eastman; they were hiring. So tell me about that.
Mr. Warlick: Well, it was in Kingsport and they offered me a job. Because I had been in Labor Economics I somehow or the other managed to be identified with personnel, so they offered me a job in the Personnel Department. Our Personnel Office was located in Knoxville on the sixth floor of the Empire Building. I don’t think the Empire Building exists now.
Mr. McDaniel: I don’t think it’s there anymore.
Mr. Warlick: Anyway, I arrived on the 31st of May, 1943. Now that was a Monday. It turns out that the next day, first of June, we had a bunch of people from TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] transfer to us, and they waited till Tuesday because they had to finish up May with TVA. I had some interesting experiences while I was there in Knoxville. Well, I think probably the most interesting, we had engineering students arrive, people like Floyd Culler and Roger Hibbs.
Mr. McDaniel: So your office, then, was at the Empire Building.
Mr. Warlick: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, right, so you were in Personnel then, where everyone came in.
Mr. Warlick: Yeah. Now my job for a while was to meet these people as they arrived, tell them, “Don’t unpack, because here’s some Pullman tickets to go to Berkeley, California. But that’s a secret.” They even tried for a while to tell these people when they went to Berkeley, they could not tell anybody. When they wrote letters, they sent it to me and I would send it to the recipients. And when people wanted to write them, they just send it to me and I’d mail it to Berkeley. That didn’t work very long. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] I’m sure it didn’t.
Mr. Warlick: So we stayed in there until the 27th of June in ’43. One of the interesting things: we had a whole pack of Pullman tickets to Berkeley which are pretty hard to get. Well, one Friday or Saturday, my boss, the head of the department, came in and said, “George, we’re not sending any more to Berkeley. Cancel those Pullman reservations.” Well, I went around to the Southern Railroad Office and canceled those boogers. Monday morning, the traffic manager who had strived to get those tickets found out and he called my boss and said I should be discharged. Those reservations were so hard to get and I’d canceled them. Well, I’d just done what my boss told me to and I think my boss protected me, but that was a –
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Oh.
Mr. Warlick: To communicate with some of these guys – well, two of them were from Chicago, and we didn’t want them to have to come down here and go back, and so I called them and gave them the information. They should get on the train in Chicago and as they went through Iowa, they were to identify themselves to a person from Knoxville. The person in Knoxville would say, “Where are you going?” And their answer is to be, “Shangri-La.” And with that, the person from Knoxville gave them their information and papers that they needed when they – now, you know, I never studied any physics in college, so it turns out that I added one and two and three and four and got one.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: When we were in college, we had the weekly newspaper, a section of Roaded Reviewer that was mailed to us from somewhere, and in those Roaded Reviewers, they covered the splitting of atoms in Berkeley. Well, that just blew me. How do you split an atom? I just couldn’t conceive of it. Now, when I was in Knoxville then, I was sending engineers to Berkeley. I didn’t know what for. They were actually sent out there to study the use of the cyclotrons because Y-12 was big Ds, which were cyclotrons, and so I knew that Berkeley was significant, but why, I didn’t know. Also in Y-12, I had access to the plant and I saw those big Ds down there. I didn’t know what they were and what they were doing, and there was a famous article printed in the magazine that told about the possibilities of nuclear power. I read it but it was over my head.
Mr. McDaniel: You didn’t connect them, huhn?
Mr. Warlick: Well, I found that article by going back to Durham, going into the stack in the summer of ’44, and I looked at the Reader’s Guide, the Reader’s Digest, whatever it was for the subject of atoms, and I had that much of a hint. I found that articles about atoms and atomic power and splitting atoms and so forth increased in volume up to 1941, and then bang, no more. That’s another point, you see, that I still didn’t realize until one day in 1945 the supervisor of our girls came to my office and said, “Come outside.” She said, “They’re telling us what we’re doing.” And I said, “Well, it has to do with atoms.” She said, “Yes, atomic bomb.”
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: We were encouraged not to ask questions. The secrecy was phenomenal.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s go back for a second. So you were in Knoxville. You were working in the personnel department in Knoxville and this was in ’43, is that correct?
Mr. Warlick: That’s correct.
Mr. McDaniel: You went there in ’43. How long did you stay at the Empire Building? How long did you stay there and then when did you move?
Mr. Warlick: Four weeks.
Mr. McDaniel: And then what did you do after that?
Mr. Warlick: On Sunday the 27th, we moved our office to Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, where was your office?
Mr. Warlick: You know where the Tunnell Building –
Mr. McDaniel: Mhm.
Mr. Warlick: That was our personnel department.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, was it? All right, and that was for Tennessee Eastman?
Mr. Warlick: Yes. There was a building behind where the doctors were involved. We had employment interviewing going on and security department where they checked our –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Warlick: It was a common joke that it took three days to get through personnel, particularly if you were a technical person. You’d come in and you’d get in line to sign up at the reception desk and then someone would help you make out your application form. If you were a technical person, someone would come up from Y-12 to interview them. But there were girls that handle this form, another would handle this form, this form, and so forth, so that there was a lot of waiting. Have to go get your physical across the street to get housing and it was really – they said that one of those flattops could be brought in Elza Gate and be set up and waiting for them before they got hired.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] That’s funny.
Mr. Warlick: The interesting part – I don’t know whether I should be telling this or not but I’ll go ahead – is you face Tunnell Building, the waiting room entrance was about forty feet from the end of the building. That forty feet was designed for colored people.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: Now, I know I should be saying ‘African Americans’ but we called them colored.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Warlick: For ninety years I’ve been –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Warlick: The front office was a big square room and behind that were restrooms and behind that, a waiting room. Well, after we had been there a few weeks, I observed that when colored people came in for applications, they went to that room. A young colored girl, who was sort of a daytime maid of our building, would go in and help them make out application forms, bring them in to the department head, he would look at them, and he’d write on there what they were hired to do and how much. She’ll take them back to that – well, I observed that I thought that was a poor way to handle those people.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Warlick: Now, I grew up in the South. My father and mother were fairly liberal in their – we had a colored maid over the years and I had no problems with them. My boss said to me, “You think that they’re not handling that right.” “Well,” I said, “I think that’s what I said.” He said, “How would you like to take over the management of the colored employment office?” And so I moved up in there. They gave me four young ladies and when those colored people came in, I interviewed them, assigned them to one of the girls, and we kept records. I was able to point out to them that I think I hired four thousand people during the War.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: I was able to show the time-in and the time-out, and we averaged about five hours a person. So we managed really quite well. I had some interesting experiences with them. We had one young – there wasn’t, at that time, a fair employment practices law; you didn’t discriminate. Tennessee Eastman did not observe –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, they didn’t? [laughter] Okay.
Mr. Warlick: The only jobs I could hire them for were for janitor, janitress, laborer, or cooks in the Cafeteria. One time a young fellow showed up and laid out his credentials. He had a degree in Engineering. I said, “I’m sorry, I do not have any requisitions for engineers. I can’t offer you anything.” “Well,” he says, “Can I have one of those jobs?” I said, “No way am I going to offer a janitor job to a degree with engineering.” So he left. One day, two colored boys that I’d hired to work in the Cafeteria showed up with a note from the manager of the cafeteria to fire them. Why? Just fire them. Won’t even talk about it, just fire them. Well, obviously, I was not going to get them back in there. Now having grown up in the Depression, I placed a high value on a job and figured if anyone was fired for cause, they were cursed for life, and I just didn’t want to fire those guys if I knew why. The second thing is we had a provision back in those days in the employment business that if you came to work in Oak Ridge and got a job, we had you. You couldn’t leave unless you got a release. And if you didn’t have a release, you couldn’t get anywhere else on the job. The idea was to protect our – so I had the dilemma. I didn’t want to fire those guys, and if they quit, they didn’t have a release, so I made a deal with them if they’d resign I’d get them a release. That worked out and they didn’t feel too badly about it. I felt pretty badly about it until a few weeks or some later, we went one night to the Island Grill in north Knoxville which was really an outstanding restaurant. It was the Regas of that day. Well, it was summer and we had open neck shirts, and we wondered if they would let us in without shirts and ties, but we said we’ll try it. Well, we opened the door, and there was one of my boys. He bowed from the waist and said, “Mr. George, come right in,” and we got premium beer, so I figured the other boy was working there too. So they survived all right and I haven’t felt too bad about it. Now, that business of ‘Mr. George,’ I was ‘Mr. George’ to thousands of colored people. I got a letter one time addressed to ‘Mr. George, T.E.C.,’ mailed in Morristown. I got it the next day.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? They knew who you were, didn’t they?
Mr. Warlick: Matter of fact, my wife, who is a registered nurse and was at Harriman Hospital after we moved to – after our children got old, which would be in 1970s – had a colored patient and he said, “You Mr. George’s [wife]?” “Yes.” I had to observe the rules of the day, but I thought, within those rules, I’m going to treat these people as humanely as possible.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, with respect, absolutely.
Mr. Warlick: There was one lady from Newport [Tennessee] I hired, and it turns out she had been a personal maid in the Stokely family up there. Now, I had been reading Thomas Wolfe’s books and was very much interested in him, and in one of his books, he related how he had gone to Newport at the invitation of the Stokely sons. So I said to this lady, “Do you remember Thomas Wolfe, ever?” “Oh, yes, Mr. George,” [she] said, “What a big man he was, and he ate seventeen biscuits.”
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: Well, many, many years later, I wrote to Wilma Dikeman, a letter, and among other things, I related that, and she wrote me back and said, “Yes, that lady went on to get a degree in Library Science and was the esteemed employee of a library in Indiana.”
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: So it’s interesting, I think. Anyway, that was my career till 1945. I was single and I moved into a dormitory, and I lived in a dormitory, M-5 it was. It turned out to be later the City Hall of Kingston. We were in there for about two or three months when they advised me one day that their plans for housing had not been sufficient. They only had three dormitories for women. They were converting our dormitory to women, and I was moved to East Village. Well, there were three dormitories down there, a cafeteria, and a drug store, so we transferred there.
Mr. McDaniel: Was that over at where that Glenwood Baptist Church is now, that dormitory area there on the East End? In the ‘A’ Streets?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah. You know, this may not be widely known, but the Northern town planners that planned this town planned that whole eastern section as being segregated for African Americans.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: If you go down there and check, they have small cemestos that are smaller than “A” houses, “sub-A”s, they’re called. An “A” house has central heat, but those houses had a space heater, and they were designed for Negros.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: And when we moved into that dormitory down there, they advised me that the color scheme was red and gray and that was the same color scheme as some famous colored night club in New York, and inside of two or three days, it had been repainted to institutional green. Well, I had to get on a bus down there and ride to Townsite, whereas my dormitory had been walking distance to my office. I’d been there early enough that I knew pretty well the man in charge of housing, and so I went up and told him, I said, “I really don’t like being that far from the office. Can you do me any good?” He said, “Yeah, come on up here.” Well, when we got there, he advised me that the room that I had been scheduled to go in, which was now M-5 or Cambridge Hall, hadn’t been vacated like he thought and he put me up in the Guest House. And he assigned me and my roommate to a big room on the second floor over the lobby. Boy, it was a big thing. Well, after a couple of days, we showed up and they advised us that that room was being held for some very important people, and our stuff had been packed and carried down to the room in M-5. So I lived in M-5 then until I got married. I had a double room in the back. Most of the people in that dormitory were Army officers, very important people, but I got in there. My roommate had to leave. He had asthma pretty bad and he moved to Dallas. Well, I had an extra place and so I mentioned it to a young lady in our office. I knew she was going with Bill Wilcox, but he was way down there in West Village. So Bill Wilcox moved in with me and we were roommates for, oh, maybe a year until I left and got married. Now, when I got married –
Mr. McDaniel: Did he wear bow ties back then?
Mr. Warlick: No.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: Bill really knew what was going on. He was in the chemistry of the thing. Never once did he mention, nor did I ever.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Warlick: I came in from Durham one night and I had brought me a bottle of liquor, and I was with Captain Bateau, an Army officer in charge of housing – it was raining, a bad night – he had nothing to do, but we’d go out and find us a house. But we didn’t. But I did get assigned an “E1” apartment on West Tennessee, across from the hospital. So that’s where we started life together.
Mr. McDaniel: You and your wife?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. What year was that?
Mr. Warlick: 1945.
Mr. McDaniel: 1945, okay.
Mr. Warlick: We had to wait till she graduated.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, I was going to ask you about that because you had met your wife, I guess, at Duke, didn’t you?
Mr. Warlick: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, and so she was going to school –
Mr. Warlick: She was Nursing at Duke University. So when she graduated we married.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Warlick: One of the interesting things about life in those days – well, first, dormitories, that stuff I gave you, for ten dollars a month, [which] was about one day’s pay, I was provided a room, linen, and maid service. We had central showers and toilets. We had a laundry in Townsite, and not once during the war years did I go to work without wearing a suit, white shirt, and tie. I did make good use of galoshes, but the legends about the mud were overdone, I think.
Mr. McDaniel: Really?
Mr. Warlick: The first year they had a lot of mud but before winter got there they began to spread gravel.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Warlick: The winter of ’43 and ’44, I think it went two months without ever raining or clearing up and there was just a slush on the walks, all the way. Most people had a story of having fallen at least once. I never fell.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you not? [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: I wanted to ask you, you mentioned something about your pay. When you were there in Oak Ridge working for Tennessee Eastman, what were you making?
Mr. Warlick: What was I making?
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, what was your –
Mr. Warlick: A dollar an hour. I was KP, people for like Floyd Culler showed up, a dollar an hour, but we were working six days a week, so Saturday was overtime, so I really made fifty-two dollars a week. We made good use of those boardwalks and I observed somewhere, those boardwalks are just wide enough for two people to walk side by side if they were friendly.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. [laughter] Well, that’s good. So what month in ’45 did you get married?
Mr. Warlick: October.
Mr. McDaniel: October. So you all got married after the –
Mr. Warlick: War was over.
Mr. McDaniel: – war was over. Right after the war was over, okay.
Mr. Warlick: Yep. Now, I tell you one thing about life in Oak Ridge in those days: there was a big game between a lot of us and those guards that Bill Sergeant was in charge of, and it was to get liquor by them.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, exactly. Where did you hide it? Where did you put it?
Mr. Warlick: Well, the one time I went to Middlesboro with some people, a man and his wife and one other person, we had one of the shopping bags full of liquor and she had it on the front seat with her legs over and we wore long overcoats then. We lined liquor bottles all the way up across the back seat. There were three of us in heavy overcoats sitting on them. We were not stopped.
Mr. McDaniel: You said you went to Middlesboro to get that?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that where you had to go or could you go someplace closer?
Mr. Warlick: Well, you could go to Chattanooga.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, right.
Mr. Warlick: One time we went to Middlesboro and our policy was [to] park around the corner from the liquor store, because we’d heard the liquor store sometimes called Oak Ridge and identified some information they get. So we got away without them ever knowing. We didn’t have a lot at that time. There was a night joint on the hill outside of Middlesboro and we stopped in there to get something to drink, I guess, coffee or Coke, and we made sure not to call each other by our right names, and someone asked, one of us, “Do you have the time?” And the bartender said, “Aw, you guys have plenty of time to get back to the Project.” [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? [laughter] So they knew, didn’t they?
Mr. Warlick: One time I did go to Chattanooga for another purpose and I bought a bottle of Black Label Schenley, and it was winter time and I had a heavy overcoat and I was on the bus coming back from Chattanooga and we came in Oliver Springs gate. I had my liquor wrapped up in a coat on the seat beside me. The guards got on, and in the overhead rack right across from me, they pulled a suitcase, a cheap little suitcase. They opened it. It was full of whiskey called Private Stock, age thirty days, covered with pine chips. Bill Sergeant, as long as he lived, use to tell about that load of –
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: I asked Bill a few years ago, “What did you all do with that?” He said, when does the statute of limitations run out? So I never knew, but we suspected.
Mr. McDaniel: Bill told the story about taking the guy to the Judge and still had his hat on and the Judge was like, “You better take that hat off if you’re” – he got in trouble for something. “You better take that hat off if you’re in front of me.” And he took his hat off and he was bald headed and then he had a bottle of liquor taped to the top of his head. [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: Yeah, it was a –
Mr. McDaniel: Hold on just a minute, Mr. Warlick.
Assistant: There was a clicking noise, but it’s gone now.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, thanks.
Mr. Warlick: I think those are the stories that really – oh, food. I thought the cafeteria was pretty good. A lot of people thought it was lousy.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Warlick: There was a place up the end of the street in that building, there’s a bowling alley in there, and there was a, we called it the Greasy Spoon, we ate sometimes there. But often someone would have a car and we went to Clinton. Have you ever heard of the Park Hotel over there?
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure.
Mr. Warlick: Boy, that was –
Mr. McDaniel: That was some place, wasn’t it?
Mr. Warlick: And if we’d go to Knoxville, we went to, oh, Highland Grill, Regas. Now Regas at that time was just a café, white tile floors. There was a bench, the counter, and some tables. But the food was really – and one of the best things about Regas, they served sizzling pork chops and they’d bring them out to the room in a tray and they were sizzling and popping when they brought them out.
Mr. McDaniel: Kind of like they do fajitas now. When you have that, they bring that skillet out with the –
Mr. Warlick: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: – pork chop on it.
Mr. Warlick: But also there were lots of places in Knoxville, this place called Seven Seas out near the UT campus and S&W.
Mr. McDaniel: S&W, sure. Was Naples around then?
Mr. Warlick: No.
Mr. McDaniel: It wasn’t there then?
Mr. Warlick: Anyway –
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s talk a little bit about your work after the war.
Mr. Warlick: Okay. War was over. Big thing we had to do was terminate thousands of employees, so I had to handle the paperwork for those. Just a little after we got married, I was transferred to Y-12, and I had an office and just one girl at that time in the office.
Mr. McDaniel: And still working for Tennessee Eastman?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah. My office down here, they had lots of gates and then the personnel department. Anyway, well, I stayed there then until somewhere in 1946. I got a letter from Lenoir-Rhyne College offering me a job to teach Economics over there. Well, now, back in those days, housing could be a real problem. I had a house and a baby and a wife in Oak Ridge and I didn’t want to go to Hickory. So I hung around and I obtained a job at X-10, or it was called Clinton Laboratories then. It was called Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I was hired to indoctrinate employees about the character of radiation and – you see, back during the War I think that you could not mention radiation, and so they established a Health Physics Division. The Health Physics Division – the Director was a former professor at Lenoir-Rhyne – he hired me on the theory that if they could explain things to me, who didn’t know any physics, then maybe I could explain it to the craftsman, non-technical personnel. Well, I think it worked.
Mr. McDaniel: Who was the head of the Health Physics Department?
Mr. Warlick: Karl Morgan. K. Z. Morgan. So I took over that job in February of ’47.
Mr. McDaniel: Now were these existing employees or new employees?
Mr. Warlick: Just all the non-technical people who had been there during the war had obeyed the rules but didn’t know why.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, exactly.
Mr. Warlick: Among other things, I produced a filmstrip. I went to Knoxville and a fellow who managed the radio station over there read my script and I would hit the button when it was time to switch to the next slide. They used that for all the time. Interesting thing that happened then, we received word from the National Safety Outfit. They had by that time devised some black and white and red [signs] saying ‘radiation.’ The National Safety people said, “Use some other color. Red is for fire.” And so they assigned me a job of coming up with another – now, my supervisor had been to California and he came back with some beautiful little blue tags with the magenta names and he loved that. [He] said, “Let’s throw that out.” I said, “No,” I didn’t like that. That didn’t show caution or anything.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Warlick: Well, the Health Division had a fellow on staff who was a graphic artist. He was good, and so I had him and/or his staff to take some of those blue and magenta tags, cut the magenta tags out, and staple them to different colored backgrounds. And then I appointed a committee; you might say I stacked the committee. We set those things up and had them view them from ten feet and twenty feet and select one that was most effective. Well, I think I had sort of arranged – they selected the yellow and –
Mr. McDaniel: The yellow and black?
Mr. Warlick: Yellow and magenta.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, yellow and magenta.
Mr. Warlick: So they selected that. I placed orders for production of the tags and with our connections of the universities, of the laboratories, they were –
Mr. McDaniel: Hold on just a second. Would you just hold that up right next to you right there? It’ll be in the shot for us. Hold it up higher, a little bit higher. All right, zoom out just a little bit for me. See that? Yeah, yeah. So that was it, huhn? That was you.
Mr. Warlick: That was me with – here’s the original one which I donated to – you know Ralph Frame?
Mr. McDaniel: Uhn-uhn.
Mr. Warlick: Well, he has a Health Physics Museum in Oak Ridge. See, this is black and –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, yeah, I know who he is.
Mr. Warlick: There’s a red, there’s black. These are the ones we rejected. So this is the one we wind up with.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, well, good.
Mr. Warlick: And here’s –
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, great, thank you. There you go.
Mr. Warlick: A few years ago, Ralph Frame got involved with some other people all over the country to determine who started that.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Warlick: And so I think they all concluded that my yellow – yellow was for me and the magenta was from California.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Well, there you go. That will certainly be part of your legacy, won’t it?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah, I guess.
Mr. McDaniel: The yellow background. There you go. So you stayed at the Lab then for – you stayed there the rest of your career?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah, I had four different jobs at the Lab. I stayed with Health Physics for a year and then I transferred to what’s called Methods and Systems system which was really sort of – I became a gofer for the Executive Director, Sam Barnett. Have you ever heard his name?
Mr. McDaniel: Mhm.
Mr. Warlick: Okay. Sam sent me on a few tasks. One of the ones I like to tell the most, if you have time –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, go ahead.
Mr. Warlick: He sent me up to the Graphite Pile. Now we had, of course, to report to EC the source of fissionable material inventories. When you put a normal uranium slug in the reactor and it was irradiated, it destroyed some of the 235, so it became depleted uranium and it established plutonium. So what they wanted to do, we had to have an inventory of normal depleted plutonium. It turns out we had a vault where we stored unirradiated uranium which was still normal, and then we had so many slugs in the reactor that were then depleted.
Mr. McDaniel: Depleted uranium.
Mr. Warlick: And we also had some plutonium, and they had a canal where they’d take irradiated slugs under water over to the next building. Well, I discovered they had so many slugs in the vault, so many slugs in the reactor, and so many slugs in the canal, but they didn’t match up. There was a difference. It turns out that when you push the slugs out the back of this pile, that had a chute – and it was coated with neoprene plates, they called it mattress plates, so the slugs would not be ruptured when they fell out – believe it or not, when I established my records up there, we had minus ten slugs on the mattress plates.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: Well, what had happened, they had lost count, and the difference between what was in the pile and what was in the canal – the first time it happened, they used mirrors and looked around, and they could see one of the slugs had dug into the mattress plate, neoprene, and was lodged there. They said, well, okay, we’ll just establish a mattress plate account, slugs in the mattress plate in the canal. Well, every time there was a difference, it was attributed to the mattress plate.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Right.
Mr. Warlick: Well, they had collected more in the canal then they had in the pile. So while I was up there, we had to acknowledge to AEC we had lost count of our slugs.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet that wasn’t pleasant, was it? [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: Well, I was laughing. Nobody else was. [laughter] So then I spent two years operating the work order control. I was part of Engineering and when work orders came in, I had several things I had to concern myself about, how to account for them and what to charge them to. And I had a crew of three people doing my work there. After I’d been there two years, Logan Emerlet, have you ever heard of him?
Mr. McDaniel: Uh-huhn, sure have.
Mr. Warlick: Friend of mine. Passed the word that a committee had reviewed employees and decided that I was underemployed, and so I transferred to the Chemistry Division to handle their budget. I stayed there for seven or eight years and the Reactor Chemistry Division was established in Y-12 to establish chemistry for the Homogeneous Reactor and the Molten Salt Reactor. Well, the Director, Warren Grimes, needed an administrative assistant. Back in those days, secretaries were ‘secretaries’ and administrative assistants were –
Mr. McDaniel: Were executives, right.
Mr. Warlick: And so I was sort of promoted to that job.
Mr. McDaniel: You were kind of a deputy, weren’t you, what they would call a deputy now?
Mr. Warlick: I think I would call it ‘executive administrative assistant.’ But anyway, Warren was a great scientist, great person, but he didn’t like the administrative matters too well and so he respected me. He took care of the technical end of the business and I took care of the administrative end, budgeting, employees, and all that. So I stayed there until 1972.
Mr. McDaniel: And by this time it was Union Carbide, is that correct?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah. Well – yeah. It became Union Carbide –
Mr. McDaniel: Early on, right, after the War?
Mr. Warlick: Back in January, 1948.
Mr. McDaniel: Right after the war, sure.
Mr. Warlick: Have you ever seen that poem, the scientists wrote that?
Mr. McDaniel: I don’t know. I don’t know that I have. I don’t think so.
Mr. Warlick: It starts out, “Deck the pile with garlands dreary, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, AEC has screwed us clearly, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, when the pile’s been fully draped, we’ll know that we’ve been raped.” Have you ever seen Alvin Weinberg’s technocrat book? Memoirs of a Technocrat.
Mr. McDaniel: No, I’ve never read that.
Mr. Warlick: Well, he has the whole poem and he has expletive words in it.
Mr. McDaniel: I understand.
Mr. Warlick: Okay, back – I moved to Reactor Chemistry in ’59 and I really thoroughly enjoyed that work, most of anything. I was managing that division. I really enjoyed managing. That was personnel. That was a diversion. I really got into managing. In ’72 we had been told to cancel the Molten Salt Reactor and so Chemistry Division was about to fold up. But before it did, Warren came in one day and handed me a sheet of paper and it was a job description from Don Trauger who was the Associate Director of the Laboratory and I read that and I looked at it twice and said, you know, “Warren, you know, I think I might apply for that job.” Trauger told me later, “It’s a good thing you did because I wrote it with you in mind.”
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] That’s good.
Mr. Warlick: So I transferred to Don Trauger and I was a natural manager. I was on his staff first and then the Budget Department was created and we, all of us fellows, were transferred into that department. But I was Finance Manager for all of Trauger’s divisions and programs. Now, I don’t know if you know about –
Mr. McDaniel: Now, was that at the Lab?
Mr. Warlick: At the Lab. I don’t know if you know the way we were organized or not. We had divisions: Chemistry Division, Physics Division, Metals and Ceramics, Engineering Technology, and so forth. These divisions had a director and group leaders. They had a full staff of people but no money. We also had programs: had the LMFBR [Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor] Program, the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] Program, the MSR [Molten Salt Reactor] Program. These programs consisted of a program director and his secretary and money. So these program directors contracted to the various divisions to do their work. Now all the money that came from AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] or ERDA [Energy Research and Development Administration] or whatever was highly coded with nine digit codes, and if we assigned money to a division they’d have a department or a group with that code. So I had a lot of code work to do.
Mr. McDaniel: How did you do that? Did you have computers?
Mr. Warlick: Just memorize. Just worked with it every day for ten years and you – Trauger did tell my wife that I was a pretty good man of numbers.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, well, that’s good. [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: So then in 1985, I planned to retire. I planned to retire in May because our budget cycle, we had to start the budget cycle in December, big job in December, and then make the proposals to Congress or to headquarters, and [in] May we were through. And so I decided to retire in May. In February I had taken my wife to Florida to stay with her mother for a while. I came back, and on Sunday afternoon, I went to the Laboratory to look over things before Monday started, and one of my peers came in and said, “Did you hear about Herb?” Herb Beckler was our department supervisor. “No, what about him?” “Well, they’ve deducted he has cancer all through his – and he was never going to come back. Well, under those circumstances, you can’t ask a guy is he going to come back or when he’s going to come back, because you know he’s never going to, but you can’t say, “We think you ought to resign.” We kept him on the roll and they agreed for me – I had my successor selected, and I had him come on in, and I took over for Herb as an Acting – you know, if you’re Acting, that means you might act so long. Herb finally died in August, and at that point they assigned one of my peers to succeed him. They had a voluntary reduction in force aimed for 30th of September which was about a month or six weeks off. Well, if I could do that, it’d be rewarding to me financially, so I rolled a lot of this stuff up while I was killing time, and so then I retired and came here. Now, you asked me about my family. Jenny came to Oak Ridge and we had a son about ten months after we got married. At that point, I went to work for Clinton Laboratory and I was eligible for a cemesto. So we moved up on Michigan Avenue to an “A” model and we lived there for four or five years and when our third child was on the way, we had another son. Now the first son, George the III, we called him ‘Biff,’ is a retired accountant from Pellissippi State. Second son, Daniel, is a very eminent lawyer in Nashville. And the third was a daughter and she is now on the faculty at University of Notre Dame, as is her husband, and they live in South Bend. They all came in last Sunday. I threw them a party for my birthday, 90th birthday. When she was on the way, we got a three-bedroom house in Woodland, one of those flattop concrete block houses. Well, come along in 1952, we learned this house was available. We came out and looked at it and bought it. So we’ve lived in Kingston ever since.
Mr. McDaniel: Ever since, huhn? I bet that “A” was getting a little crowded with two little boys running around, wasn’t it?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah. Now, while I was in Oak Ridge, I had a couple other – I helped start the Community Chest and I served as President one year, now known as United Way. I was Chairman of the Tennessee Boy Scout – what do they call it – not a council but the Region. And we helped build the first treasury in church and taught Sunday school there. So we had some activities in Oak Ridge. When we came to Kingston, we sensed – we were in the vanguard of a huge entourage from Oak Ridge, and we sensed there was some resentment of the old timers about us newcomers come to –
Mr. McDaniel: Kingston, right.
Mr. Warlick: And so I sort of laid low for a year. Now, I had belonged to the Rotary Club in Oak Ridge from 1948 to 1952. When we moved to Kingston, I continued to belong to that because it was a noon club and I worked in Oak Ridge during the daytime. Well, in 1954, we got around to organizing the Oak Ridge Community Chest. That was interesting in a way. One of the reasons for organizing it was that the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were raising pathetic amounts of money out here and – have you ever heard of the Daniel Arthur Center?
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, of course.
Mr. Warlick: The Lions Club here had donated money to buy them a station wagon to carry people from their places over in Oak Ridge. First it was in Clinton and then to Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Was it the Emory Valley Center?
Mr. Warlick: That’s where it was located. Anyway, also there were about two thousand people in Roane County that worked at Carbide and I knew that Carbide persuaded its employees to contribute. I remember one time I was Chairman of the Laboratory one year and the director of the Laboratory was encouraging people to give and towards the end of the campaign we were seventy dollars short. He called seven division directors and said, “Send me ten dollars; we’re going to make our goal.” So I knew that Carbide really encouraged employees and so people in Roane County who worked at the Lab were paying for the Oak Ridge Community Chest, not without some resentment. So we organized the Roane County – the Kingston Rotary Club organized the Community Chest. So I went over to K-25 to see Tom Lane. You’ve heard of Tom Lane?
Mr. McDaniel: Mhm.
Mr. Warlick: Tom and I were friends from Rotary and other works, and he said, “Now if at the present time an employee wants to contribute through the company, he can sign a pledge and the company would take it out of your pay check and give it to Oak Ridge Community Chest.” I said, “Kingston would like to have the same privilege.” We figured if whatever the two thousand people out here were giving to Oak Ridge, under some encouragement, would give to us. He said, “I’m sorry, George. If I go to Kingston, then I’ve got to go to Clinton, Lenoir City, Oliver Springs, and Rockwood, and we don’t have a computer yet.” He didn’t say that. “The bookkeeping is too much detail for our clerks to handle.” Well, I came back thinking about it, and about that time some people from Harriman and Rockwood – I guess their Rotary Clubs – approached me and said, “I understand you’re talking about a Community Chest for Kingston. How about making it for Roane County?” “That’s a good idea. We’ll go back to Tom and say the whole county, not the individual towns.” Well, in the meantime, in our organization, we had had the foresight to include Tanya Sutter who was wife of Clark Sutter, Carbide President, and Oral Reinhardt from Kingston who was fiscal manager for K-25. So Oral and I approached Tom. He says, “I know when I’ve been cornered.” And so they permitted Roane County people to designate their contributions to go to the Roane County Chamber of Commerce. Couple of interesting things happened then. The first year, there were people in Knoxville who also resented contributing to the Oak Ridge Community Chest contributing to Roane County.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Warlick: And the next year Carbide accepted the Knox County Community Chest. We had Roane County Community Chest, not just the city, and somewhere along the way Knoxville Community Chest expanded to Knox County and the Oak Ridge Community Chest, which I had expanded to the Anderson County Community Chest. So I was part of the Roane County Community Chest for over twenty or thirty years, I guess, Treasurer, almost account manager at times, but I retired from that. In ’55, as I said, we organized the Kingston Rotary Club and so I have been active in that. I was Charter President and then Treasurer for years and years and presently still Treasurer.
Mr. McDaniel: Where did you meet? Did you meet at the Hut?
Mr. Warlick: We started off at Ellis Diner. Now you’ve never heard of that, but it’s on a dyke down there. You know where the Boy Scouts have their Christmas trees?
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure.
Mr. Warlick: Well, there was a little restaurant there.
Mr. McDaniel: There was a little restaurant right down there at what they call the gravel pit now.
Mr. Warlick: Yeah, but it wasn’t then.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Warlick: Well, they closed up and we went to David’s Diner in Midtown. And they closed up and we came to, oh, I think there’s a restaurant in the basement of what’s now Eduardo’s.
Mr. McDaniel: I don’t know where that is.
Mr. Warlick: Mexican place down here at the end of the road beside the brewery.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh ,yeah, sure.
Mr. Warlick: We joked that we have closed up more restaurants.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: Right now we’re meeting with two chefs which is across the street from Mamma Mia’s.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I know where that is. So you didn’t ever meet at the Hut downtown?
Mr. Warlick: Oh, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, yeah, that’s what I was about to say. You met at the Hut.
Mr. Warlick: We met upstairs for a while until some of the members couldn’t climb the stairs and then we met downstairs.
Mr. McDaniel: You know, it’s interesting, when I was in high school, I sang. I sang, played guitar, and sang, and my senior year in high school, two nights a week, I would go in and play my guitar and sing at the Hut during dinner time for ten dollars and dinner for a night. I thought that was a pretty good gig.
Mr. Warlick: We’ve belonged to the Presbyterian Church since we’ve been here. I sang in the choir for a while. I was a member of the Board of Trustees a couple times. I taught a Sunday School class for about ten years. I believe that’s –
Mr. McDaniel: Is that it, so far?
Mr. Warlick: My story of Kingston and Oak Ridge –
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Anything else you want to mention? We’ve got time if you want to.
Mr. Warlick: I have pages and pages of anecdotes that I – one of my funny things I remember, when I was gofer for the Executive Director, I had to handle arrangements for moving members and one of my tasks was – Alvin Weinberg was Research Director and Mike Murphy, Major Mike Murphy, was Assistant. Well, there was a building down in the middle of the campus there I call the training school, two story frame, and so they decided to move them there. So I moved them. Now, Mike Murphy’s secretary was Elizabeth Richardson. She was a very strong personality.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: Equally forceful approach. Well, later when Alvin’s secretary by the name of Nina Croupoff resigned, she was promoted to be Alvin’s secretary. But before that, the day we moved them in down there – have you ever seen one of those three-way plugs we had back in those days? Now, it’s not like that now. It was like that.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, sure, yes.
Mr. Warlick: Well, Mike insisted I give him two telephones so they could talk to Washington and San Francisco at the same time. Also, he and Elizabeth wanted to have buzzers, that he could buzz her and she could buzz him. Well, it took all day to get them moved in. Now, at that time, the prize for secretaries was an electric typewriter. You had to claim that you had to type, make seven carbon copies, but anyway, Elizabeth got one of the first electric typewriters. When we left, the telephone men were still there and they were installing the buzzers. Well, they had to hook a transformer in. They had no plugs to fit those three-way things that we had, so they looked around to where they could find one. Guess what they saw?
Mr. McDaniel: What?
Mr. Warlick: Elizabeth’s typewriter.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Oh, my.
Mr. Warlick: So they cut it off and installed their buzzers and went home. The next morning I was hardly in my desk when the telephone began [ringing]. Elizabeth says, “Who cut the plugs off of my typewriter?”
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Warlick: I said, I don’t know but I’ll get you one real quick. I called the Electrical Department and they were up there –
Mr. McDaniel: I bet. Oh, my goodness. Well, Mr. Warlick, we sure do appreciate you taking time to talk with us. You’ve had a long, illustrious career in Oak Ridge and Kingston and we appreciate it. I learned a lot of new stuff today, things that I had not known before, so we appreciate you taking time to talk to us.
Mr. Warlick: I think about it a whole lot too. When you get as old as I am, you have too many memories.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, I understand. Well, thank you so much.
Mr. Warlick: You’re welcome.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF GEORGE C. WARLICK, JR.
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
June 20, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel. Today is June the 20th, 2011 and I am in Kingston at the home of Mr. George Warlick, and thank you for taking time to speak with us. I want to start at the very beginning. Tell me about where you were born and raised and something about your family and where you went to school.
Mr. Warlick: All right. I was born in 1921, June 12th, in Hickory, North Carolina. Hickory was a small manufacturing town, fairly prosperous. As a matter of fact, I was born in a hospital in Hickory, which I have been told is not normal for a lot of people in 1921. My father was a sixth generation American. He grew up on a farm in Lincoln County, North Carolina, so I was a seventh generation. My mother was born of a cotton farmer in Cleveland County and I believe that she was seventh generation. I’m eight generation in that one. My family was well educated. My father had been a college professor before War World I interrupted his career. My mother was a college teacher in Catawba College in North Carolina. When dad got out of the army in 1919, it was springtime, and there were not many college positions opened at that time, so he was employed by a farmer supply store which he ultimately bought and operated till 1942, Second World War. It was not highly successful, but it was a fairly successful business. I grew up, of course, in the Depression, and while – my father was not highly successful, and I knew very well the depression was on, but he raised us pretty good. A family that appreciated music, arts. I was given piano lessons as an early boy and I joined the boy scouts, an Eagle Scout, and we belonged to an outstanding church. So I was given a fairly good start in life. I finished my public schools in Hickory and while I was not spectacular, I was an Honor student. We were fortunate to have a Lutheran College, Lenoir-Rhyne College, located in Hickory, so we were able to continue to go onto college living at home and not much different from high school.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Did you have brothers or sisters?
Mr. Warlick: I have two brothers and one sister. At the conclusion of my college career, which was spring of 1942, I received a scholarship from Duke University. Since I had a heart condition that kept me out of a lot of things, I was listed as 4F and so I received this scholarship from Duke. Now, my degree at Lenoir-Rhyne was in Business Administration. What I really should have been able to do was to get an MBA, a Master of Business Administration, but they did not issue them at that time, and so I got a degree in Economics, which I thought was the nearest thing to business.
Mr. McDaniel: So they didn’t offer MBAs then, nobody offered them, right?
Mr. Warlick: No. If they did, I didn’t have sense enough to ask for it.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Right.
Mr. Warlick: Well, I had a year at Duke in the graduate school. Best thing that happened there was I met the nursing student who I later married. In the spring of 1943 I knew my graduate studies were about to come to an end for several reasons and I went to the appointment’s office at Duke University, and very fine woman, Sandy Yarborough-Mitchell, ran the Appointments Office, she advised me that Tennessee Eastman in Kingsport had openings, and so she arranged and I went up to Tennessee Eastman in Kingsport and was interviewed for a job.
Mr. McDaniel: Let me stop you there for a second. The Appointments Office, I’d never heard of that. Was that like what they would call ‘placement’ now for graduates, to help them find jobs?
Mr. Warlick: But I think we called it ‘appointments’ then.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, sure.
Mr. Warlick: It’s the same thing.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s go back, before we move on to that. So your dad, you said he was a college professor, and then War World I came along, and after that he went to work at the farmer –
Mr. Warlick: No, he was in – yeah, okay, you got it.
Mr. McDaniel: And he went to work at the farmer’s store where – he eventually bought it.
Mr. Warlick: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: And he had that until ’42, you said.
Mr. Warlick: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: So all through the Depression – you said that you didn’t have a lot but you had what you needed. Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah, he bought a new car every four years. We had a nice brick house. Mother always had a maid. We had telephone, two newspapers, but still I knew that there was not a lot of discretionary money available.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Now the Depression, I know it hit hard everywhere, but in Hickory and that area over there, was that like everywhere else or was it kind of immune to some of the worst parts of it?
Mr. Warlick: We came through the Depression fairly well. Some of the mills or manufacturing plants went on three-day-week, but I remember seeing trains go through town with hobos riding them. I knew the depression was on. I knew that Herbert Hoover said we were about to turn the corner, but still – Dad’s little store, he had one man to help him, and he was always able to pay the rent and pay his help, but I think there may have been years when he made nothing for himself. But unlike a lot of the businesses these days, he was not highly leveraged, so he was able to keep his nose above water and keep the store going.
Mr. McDaniel: I guess most of the mills, I know now many of the mills in that area of North Carolina do furniture, make furniture. What was the industry like then?
Mr. Warlick: Well, cotton mills were the biggest thing. There were furniture factories and hosiery.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, and that was in and around Hickory there?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah, it was on the outskirts. Hickory really expanded to take them in as time went by.
Mr. McDaniel: And is that Catawba County?
Mr. Warlick: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: I was just there a couple of months ago, as a matter of fact.
Mr. Warlick: I left there in 1942, so it has really exploded since I –
Mr. McDaniel: I went and interviewed Dr. Cuyler Dunbar, the first President of Roane State, and his wife, Sandy, and, of course, he was at Catawba Valley Community College for twenty years after he left Roane State.
Mr. Warlick: Cuyler and I were good friends –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Warlick: – when he lived here, and one time I was back in Hickory and we went to the church where I attended and the son of my scout master was still in that church and his daughter had become a minister and she was preaching that Sunday we were there, and because her father was high on the Board of the Community College, Cuyler and Sandy attended that service, so we had a chance to meet them again.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, well, good.
Mr. Warlick: And if I’m not mistaken, we had a reunion at the College a couple of years ago and Cuyler and Sandy were there. I had some time with the College, come later.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Well, they’re great people and it was a nice visit I had with them. So you came along, you graduated, you got your Masters in Economics from Duke. And so you went up to Tennessee Eastman; they were hiring. So tell me about that.
Mr. Warlick: Well, it was in Kingsport and they offered me a job. Because I had been in Labor Economics I somehow or the other managed to be identified with personnel, so they offered me a job in the Personnel Department. Our Personnel Office was located in Knoxville on the sixth floor of the Empire Building. I don’t think the Empire Building exists now.
Mr. McDaniel: I don’t think it’s there anymore.
Mr. Warlick: Anyway, I arrived on the 31st of May, 1943. Now that was a Monday. It turns out that the next day, first of June, we had a bunch of people from TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] transfer to us, and they waited till Tuesday because they had to finish up May with TVA. I had some interesting experiences while I was there in Knoxville. Well, I think probably the most interesting, we had engineering students arrive, people like Floyd Culler and Roger Hibbs.
Mr. McDaniel: So your office, then, was at the Empire Building.
Mr. Warlick: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, right, so you were in Personnel then, where everyone came in.
Mr. Warlick: Yeah. Now my job for a while was to meet these people as they arrived, tell them, “Don’t unpack, because here’s some Pullman tickets to go to Berkeley, California. But that’s a secret.” They even tried for a while to tell these people when they went to Berkeley, they could not tell anybody. When they wrote letters, they sent it to me and I would send it to the recipients. And when people wanted to write them, they just send it to me and I’d mail it to Berkeley. That didn’t work very long. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] I’m sure it didn’t.
Mr. Warlick: So we stayed in there until the 27th of June in ’43. One of the interesting things: we had a whole pack of Pullman tickets to Berkeley which are pretty hard to get. Well, one Friday or Saturday, my boss, the head of the department, came in and said, “George, we’re not sending any more to Berkeley. Cancel those Pullman reservations.” Well, I went around to the Southern Railroad Office and canceled those boogers. Monday morning, the traffic manager who had strived to get those tickets found out and he called my boss and said I should be discharged. Those reservations were so hard to get and I’d canceled them. Well, I’d just done what my boss told me to and I think my boss protected me, but that was a –
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Oh.
Mr. Warlick: To communicate with some of these guys – well, two of them were from Chicago, and we didn’t want them to have to come down here and go back, and so I called them and gave them the information. They should get on the train in Chicago and as they went through Iowa, they were to identify themselves to a person from Knoxville. The person in Knoxville would say, “Where are you going?” And their answer is to be, “Shangri-La.” And with that, the person from Knoxville gave them their information and papers that they needed when they – now, you know, I never studied any physics in college, so it turns out that I added one and two and three and four and got one.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: When we were in college, we had the weekly newspaper, a section of Roaded Reviewer that was mailed to us from somewhere, and in those Roaded Reviewers, they covered the splitting of atoms in Berkeley. Well, that just blew me. How do you split an atom? I just couldn’t conceive of it. Now, when I was in Knoxville then, I was sending engineers to Berkeley. I didn’t know what for. They were actually sent out there to study the use of the cyclotrons because Y-12 was big Ds, which were cyclotrons, and so I knew that Berkeley was significant, but why, I didn’t know. Also in Y-12, I had access to the plant and I saw those big Ds down there. I didn’t know what they were and what they were doing, and there was a famous article printed in the magazine that told about the possibilities of nuclear power. I read it but it was over my head.
Mr. McDaniel: You didn’t connect them, huhn?
Mr. Warlick: Well, I found that article by going back to Durham, going into the stack in the summer of ’44, and I looked at the Reader’s Guide, the Reader’s Digest, whatever it was for the subject of atoms, and I had that much of a hint. I found that articles about atoms and atomic power and splitting atoms and so forth increased in volume up to 1941, and then bang, no more. That’s another point, you see, that I still didn’t realize until one day in 1945 the supervisor of our girls came to my office and said, “Come outside.” She said, “They’re telling us what we’re doing.” And I said, “Well, it has to do with atoms.” She said, “Yes, atomic bomb.”
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: We were encouraged not to ask questions. The secrecy was phenomenal.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s go back for a second. So you were in Knoxville. You were working in the personnel department in Knoxville and this was in ’43, is that correct?
Mr. Warlick: That’s correct.
Mr. McDaniel: You went there in ’43. How long did you stay at the Empire Building? How long did you stay there and then when did you move?
Mr. Warlick: Four weeks.
Mr. McDaniel: And then what did you do after that?
Mr. Warlick: On Sunday the 27th, we moved our office to Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, where was your office?
Mr. Warlick: You know where the Tunnell Building –
Mr. McDaniel: Mhm.
Mr. Warlick: That was our personnel department.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, was it? All right, and that was for Tennessee Eastman?
Mr. Warlick: Yes. There was a building behind where the doctors were involved. We had employment interviewing going on and security department where they checked our –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Warlick: It was a common joke that it took three days to get through personnel, particularly if you were a technical person. You’d come in and you’d get in line to sign up at the reception desk and then someone would help you make out your application form. If you were a technical person, someone would come up from Y-12 to interview them. But there were girls that handle this form, another would handle this form, this form, and so forth, so that there was a lot of waiting. Have to go get your physical across the street to get housing and it was really – they said that one of those flattops could be brought in Elza Gate and be set up and waiting for them before they got hired.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] That’s funny.
Mr. Warlick: The interesting part – I don’t know whether I should be telling this or not but I’ll go ahead – is you face Tunnell Building, the waiting room entrance was about forty feet from the end of the building. That forty feet was designed for colored people.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: Now, I know I should be saying ‘African Americans’ but we called them colored.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Warlick: For ninety years I’ve been –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Warlick: The front office was a big square room and behind that were restrooms and behind that, a waiting room. Well, after we had been there a few weeks, I observed that when colored people came in for applications, they went to that room. A young colored girl, who was sort of a daytime maid of our building, would go in and help them make out application forms, bring them in to the department head, he would look at them, and he’d write on there what they were hired to do and how much. She’ll take them back to that – well, I observed that I thought that was a poor way to handle those people.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Warlick: Now, I grew up in the South. My father and mother were fairly liberal in their – we had a colored maid over the years and I had no problems with them. My boss said to me, “You think that they’re not handling that right.” “Well,” I said, “I think that’s what I said.” He said, “How would you like to take over the management of the colored employment office?” And so I moved up in there. They gave me four young ladies and when those colored people came in, I interviewed them, assigned them to one of the girls, and we kept records. I was able to point out to them that I think I hired four thousand people during the War.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: I was able to show the time-in and the time-out, and we averaged about five hours a person. So we managed really quite well. I had some interesting experiences with them. We had one young – there wasn’t, at that time, a fair employment practices law; you didn’t discriminate. Tennessee Eastman did not observe –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, they didn’t? [laughter] Okay.
Mr. Warlick: The only jobs I could hire them for were for janitor, janitress, laborer, or cooks in the Cafeteria. One time a young fellow showed up and laid out his credentials. He had a degree in Engineering. I said, “I’m sorry, I do not have any requisitions for engineers. I can’t offer you anything.” “Well,” he says, “Can I have one of those jobs?” I said, “No way am I going to offer a janitor job to a degree with engineering.” So he left. One day, two colored boys that I’d hired to work in the Cafeteria showed up with a note from the manager of the cafeteria to fire them. Why? Just fire them. Won’t even talk about it, just fire them. Well, obviously, I was not going to get them back in there. Now having grown up in the Depression, I placed a high value on a job and figured if anyone was fired for cause, they were cursed for life, and I just didn’t want to fire those guys if I knew why. The second thing is we had a provision back in those days in the employment business that if you came to work in Oak Ridge and got a job, we had you. You couldn’t leave unless you got a release. And if you didn’t have a release, you couldn’t get anywhere else on the job. The idea was to protect our – so I had the dilemma. I didn’t want to fire those guys, and if they quit, they didn’t have a release, so I made a deal with them if they’d resign I’d get them a release. That worked out and they didn’t feel too badly about it. I felt pretty badly about it until a few weeks or some later, we went one night to the Island Grill in north Knoxville which was really an outstanding restaurant. It was the Regas of that day. Well, it was summer and we had open neck shirts, and we wondered if they would let us in without shirts and ties, but we said we’ll try it. Well, we opened the door, and there was one of my boys. He bowed from the waist and said, “Mr. George, come right in,” and we got premium beer, so I figured the other boy was working there too. So they survived all right and I haven’t felt too bad about it. Now, that business of ‘Mr. George,’ I was ‘Mr. George’ to thousands of colored people. I got a letter one time addressed to ‘Mr. George, T.E.C.,’ mailed in Morristown. I got it the next day.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? They knew who you were, didn’t they?
Mr. Warlick: Matter of fact, my wife, who is a registered nurse and was at Harriman Hospital after we moved to – after our children got old, which would be in 1970s – had a colored patient and he said, “You Mr. George’s [wife]?” “Yes.” I had to observe the rules of the day, but I thought, within those rules, I’m going to treat these people as humanely as possible.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, with respect, absolutely.
Mr. Warlick: There was one lady from Newport [Tennessee] I hired, and it turns out she had been a personal maid in the Stokely family up there. Now, I had been reading Thomas Wolfe’s books and was very much interested in him, and in one of his books, he related how he had gone to Newport at the invitation of the Stokely sons. So I said to this lady, “Do you remember Thomas Wolfe, ever?” “Oh, yes, Mr. George,” [she] said, “What a big man he was, and he ate seventeen biscuits.”
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: Well, many, many years later, I wrote to Wilma Dikeman, a letter, and among other things, I related that, and she wrote me back and said, “Yes, that lady went on to get a degree in Library Science and was the esteemed employee of a library in Indiana.”
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: So it’s interesting, I think. Anyway, that was my career till 1945. I was single and I moved into a dormitory, and I lived in a dormitory, M-5 it was. It turned out to be later the City Hall of Kingston. We were in there for about two or three months when they advised me one day that their plans for housing had not been sufficient. They only had three dormitories for women. They were converting our dormitory to women, and I was moved to East Village. Well, there were three dormitories down there, a cafeteria, and a drug store, so we transferred there.
Mr. McDaniel: Was that over at where that Glenwood Baptist Church is now, that dormitory area there on the East End? In the ‘A’ Streets?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah. You know, this may not be widely known, but the Northern town planners that planned this town planned that whole eastern section as being segregated for African Americans.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: If you go down there and check, they have small cemestos that are smaller than “A” houses, “sub-A”s, they’re called. An “A” house has central heat, but those houses had a space heater, and they were designed for Negros.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: And when we moved into that dormitory down there, they advised me that the color scheme was red and gray and that was the same color scheme as some famous colored night club in New York, and inside of two or three days, it had been repainted to institutional green. Well, I had to get on a bus down there and ride to Townsite, whereas my dormitory had been walking distance to my office. I’d been there early enough that I knew pretty well the man in charge of housing, and so I went up and told him, I said, “I really don’t like being that far from the office. Can you do me any good?” He said, “Yeah, come on up here.” Well, when we got there, he advised me that the room that I had been scheduled to go in, which was now M-5 or Cambridge Hall, hadn’t been vacated like he thought and he put me up in the Guest House. And he assigned me and my roommate to a big room on the second floor over the lobby. Boy, it was a big thing. Well, after a couple of days, we showed up and they advised us that that room was being held for some very important people, and our stuff had been packed and carried down to the room in M-5. So I lived in M-5 then until I got married. I had a double room in the back. Most of the people in that dormitory were Army officers, very important people, but I got in there. My roommate had to leave. He had asthma pretty bad and he moved to Dallas. Well, I had an extra place and so I mentioned it to a young lady in our office. I knew she was going with Bill Wilcox, but he was way down there in West Village. So Bill Wilcox moved in with me and we were roommates for, oh, maybe a year until I left and got married. Now, when I got married –
Mr. McDaniel: Did he wear bow ties back then?
Mr. Warlick: No.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: Bill really knew what was going on. He was in the chemistry of the thing. Never once did he mention, nor did I ever.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Warlick: I came in from Durham one night and I had brought me a bottle of liquor, and I was with Captain Bateau, an Army officer in charge of housing – it was raining, a bad night – he had nothing to do, but we’d go out and find us a house. But we didn’t. But I did get assigned an “E1” apartment on West Tennessee, across from the hospital. So that’s where we started life together.
Mr. McDaniel: You and your wife?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. What year was that?
Mr. Warlick: 1945.
Mr. McDaniel: 1945, okay.
Mr. Warlick: We had to wait till she graduated.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, I was going to ask you about that because you had met your wife, I guess, at Duke, didn’t you?
Mr. Warlick: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, and so she was going to school –
Mr. Warlick: She was Nursing at Duke University. So when she graduated we married.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Warlick: One of the interesting things about life in those days – well, first, dormitories, that stuff I gave you, for ten dollars a month, [which] was about one day’s pay, I was provided a room, linen, and maid service. We had central showers and toilets. We had a laundry in Townsite, and not once during the war years did I go to work without wearing a suit, white shirt, and tie. I did make good use of galoshes, but the legends about the mud were overdone, I think.
Mr. McDaniel: Really?
Mr. Warlick: The first year they had a lot of mud but before winter got there they began to spread gravel.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Warlick: The winter of ’43 and ’44, I think it went two months without ever raining or clearing up and there was just a slush on the walks, all the way. Most people had a story of having fallen at least once. I never fell.
Mr. McDaniel: Did you not? [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: I wanted to ask you, you mentioned something about your pay. When you were there in Oak Ridge working for Tennessee Eastman, what were you making?
Mr. Warlick: What was I making?
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, what was your –
Mr. Warlick: A dollar an hour. I was KP, people for like Floyd Culler showed up, a dollar an hour, but we were working six days a week, so Saturday was overtime, so I really made fifty-two dollars a week. We made good use of those boardwalks and I observed somewhere, those boardwalks are just wide enough for two people to walk side by side if they were friendly.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. [laughter] Well, that’s good. So what month in ’45 did you get married?
Mr. Warlick: October.
Mr. McDaniel: October. So you all got married after the –
Mr. Warlick: War was over.
Mr. McDaniel: – war was over. Right after the war was over, okay.
Mr. Warlick: Yep. Now, I tell you one thing about life in Oak Ridge in those days: there was a big game between a lot of us and those guards that Bill Sergeant was in charge of, and it was to get liquor by them.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, exactly. Where did you hide it? Where did you put it?
Mr. Warlick: Well, the one time I went to Middlesboro with some people, a man and his wife and one other person, we had one of the shopping bags full of liquor and she had it on the front seat with her legs over and we wore long overcoats then. We lined liquor bottles all the way up across the back seat. There were three of us in heavy overcoats sitting on them. We were not stopped.
Mr. McDaniel: You said you went to Middlesboro to get that?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that where you had to go or could you go someplace closer?
Mr. Warlick: Well, you could go to Chattanooga.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, right.
Mr. Warlick: One time we went to Middlesboro and our policy was [to] park around the corner from the liquor store, because we’d heard the liquor store sometimes called Oak Ridge and identified some information they get. So we got away without them ever knowing. We didn’t have a lot at that time. There was a night joint on the hill outside of Middlesboro and we stopped in there to get something to drink, I guess, coffee or Coke, and we made sure not to call each other by our right names, and someone asked, one of us, “Do you have the time?” And the bartender said, “Aw, you guys have plenty of time to get back to the Project.” [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? [laughter] So they knew, didn’t they?
Mr. Warlick: One time I did go to Chattanooga for another purpose and I bought a bottle of Black Label Schenley, and it was winter time and I had a heavy overcoat and I was on the bus coming back from Chattanooga and we came in Oliver Springs gate. I had my liquor wrapped up in a coat on the seat beside me. The guards got on, and in the overhead rack right across from me, they pulled a suitcase, a cheap little suitcase. They opened it. It was full of whiskey called Private Stock, age thirty days, covered with pine chips. Bill Sergeant, as long as he lived, use to tell about that load of –
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: I asked Bill a few years ago, “What did you all do with that?” He said, when does the statute of limitations run out? So I never knew, but we suspected.
Mr. McDaniel: Bill told the story about taking the guy to the Judge and still had his hat on and the Judge was like, “You better take that hat off if you’re” – he got in trouble for something. “You better take that hat off if you’re in front of me.” And he took his hat off and he was bald headed and then he had a bottle of liquor taped to the top of his head. [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: Yeah, it was a –
Mr. McDaniel: Hold on just a minute, Mr. Warlick.
Assistant: There was a clicking noise, but it’s gone now.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, thanks.
Mr. Warlick: I think those are the stories that really – oh, food. I thought the cafeteria was pretty good. A lot of people thought it was lousy.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Warlick: There was a place up the end of the street in that building, there’s a bowling alley in there, and there was a, we called it the Greasy Spoon, we ate sometimes there. But often someone would have a car and we went to Clinton. Have you ever heard of the Park Hotel over there?
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure.
Mr. Warlick: Boy, that was –
Mr. McDaniel: That was some place, wasn’t it?
Mr. Warlick: And if we’d go to Knoxville, we went to, oh, Highland Grill, Regas. Now Regas at that time was just a café, white tile floors. There was a bench, the counter, and some tables. But the food was really – and one of the best things about Regas, they served sizzling pork chops and they’d bring them out to the room in a tray and they were sizzling and popping when they brought them out.
Mr. McDaniel: Kind of like they do fajitas now. When you have that, they bring that skillet out with the –
Mr. Warlick: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: – pork chop on it.
Mr. Warlick: But also there were lots of places in Knoxville, this place called Seven Seas out near the UT campus and S&W.
Mr. McDaniel: S&W, sure. Was Naples around then?
Mr. Warlick: No.
Mr. McDaniel: It wasn’t there then?
Mr. Warlick: Anyway –
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s talk a little bit about your work after the war.
Mr. Warlick: Okay. War was over. Big thing we had to do was terminate thousands of employees, so I had to handle the paperwork for those. Just a little after we got married, I was transferred to Y-12, and I had an office and just one girl at that time in the office.
Mr. McDaniel: And still working for Tennessee Eastman?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah. My office down here, they had lots of gates and then the personnel department. Anyway, well, I stayed there then until somewhere in 1946. I got a letter from Lenoir-Rhyne College offering me a job to teach Economics over there. Well, now, back in those days, housing could be a real problem. I had a house and a baby and a wife in Oak Ridge and I didn’t want to go to Hickory. So I hung around and I obtained a job at X-10, or it was called Clinton Laboratories then. It was called Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I was hired to indoctrinate employees about the character of radiation and – you see, back during the War I think that you could not mention radiation, and so they established a Health Physics Division. The Health Physics Division – the Director was a former professor at Lenoir-Rhyne – he hired me on the theory that if they could explain things to me, who didn’t know any physics, then maybe I could explain it to the craftsman, non-technical personnel. Well, I think it worked.
Mr. McDaniel: Who was the head of the Health Physics Department?
Mr. Warlick: Karl Morgan. K. Z. Morgan. So I took over that job in February of ’47.
Mr. McDaniel: Now were these existing employees or new employees?
Mr. Warlick: Just all the non-technical people who had been there during the war had obeyed the rules but didn’t know why.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, exactly.
Mr. Warlick: Among other things, I produced a filmstrip. I went to Knoxville and a fellow who managed the radio station over there read my script and I would hit the button when it was time to switch to the next slide. They used that for all the time. Interesting thing that happened then, we received word from the National Safety Outfit. They had by that time devised some black and white and red [signs] saying ‘radiation.’ The National Safety people said, “Use some other color. Red is for fire.” And so they assigned me a job of coming up with another – now, my supervisor had been to California and he came back with some beautiful little blue tags with the magenta names and he loved that. [He] said, “Let’s throw that out.” I said, “No,” I didn’t like that. That didn’t show caution or anything.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mr. Warlick: Well, the Health Division had a fellow on staff who was a graphic artist. He was good, and so I had him and/or his staff to take some of those blue and magenta tags, cut the magenta tags out, and staple them to different colored backgrounds. And then I appointed a committee; you might say I stacked the committee. We set those things up and had them view them from ten feet and twenty feet and select one that was most effective. Well, I think I had sort of arranged – they selected the yellow and –
Mr. McDaniel: The yellow and black?
Mr. Warlick: Yellow and magenta.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, yellow and magenta.
Mr. Warlick: So they selected that. I placed orders for production of the tags and with our connections of the universities, of the laboratories, they were –
Mr. McDaniel: Hold on just a second. Would you just hold that up right next to you right there? It’ll be in the shot for us. Hold it up higher, a little bit higher. All right, zoom out just a little bit for me. See that? Yeah, yeah. So that was it, huhn? That was you.
Mr. Warlick: That was me with – here’s the original one which I donated to – you know Ralph Frame?
Mr. McDaniel: Uhn-uhn.
Mr. Warlick: Well, he has a Health Physics Museum in Oak Ridge. See, this is black and –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, yeah, I know who he is.
Mr. Warlick: There’s a red, there’s black. These are the ones we rejected. So this is the one we wind up with.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, well, good.
Mr. Warlick: And here’s –
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, great, thank you. There you go.
Mr. Warlick: A few years ago, Ralph Frame got involved with some other people all over the country to determine who started that.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Warlick: And so I think they all concluded that my yellow – yellow was for me and the magenta was from California.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Well, there you go. That will certainly be part of your legacy, won’t it?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah, I guess.
Mr. McDaniel: The yellow background. There you go. So you stayed at the Lab then for – you stayed there the rest of your career?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah, I had four different jobs at the Lab. I stayed with Health Physics for a year and then I transferred to what’s called Methods and Systems system which was really sort of – I became a gofer for the Executive Director, Sam Barnett. Have you ever heard his name?
Mr. McDaniel: Mhm.
Mr. Warlick: Okay. Sam sent me on a few tasks. One of the ones I like to tell the most, if you have time –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, go ahead.
Mr. Warlick: He sent me up to the Graphite Pile. Now we had, of course, to report to EC the source of fissionable material inventories. When you put a normal uranium slug in the reactor and it was irradiated, it destroyed some of the 235, so it became depleted uranium and it established plutonium. So what they wanted to do, we had to have an inventory of normal depleted plutonium. It turns out we had a vault where we stored unirradiated uranium which was still normal, and then we had so many slugs in the reactor that were then depleted.
Mr. McDaniel: Depleted uranium.
Mr. Warlick: And we also had some plutonium, and they had a canal where they’d take irradiated slugs under water over to the next building. Well, I discovered they had so many slugs in the vault, so many slugs in the reactor, and so many slugs in the canal, but they didn’t match up. There was a difference. It turns out that when you push the slugs out the back of this pile, that had a chute – and it was coated with neoprene plates, they called it mattress plates, so the slugs would not be ruptured when they fell out – believe it or not, when I established my records up there, we had minus ten slugs on the mattress plates.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mr. Warlick: Well, what had happened, they had lost count, and the difference between what was in the pile and what was in the canal – the first time it happened, they used mirrors and looked around, and they could see one of the slugs had dug into the mattress plate, neoprene, and was lodged there. They said, well, okay, we’ll just establish a mattress plate account, slugs in the mattress plate in the canal. Well, every time there was a difference, it was attributed to the mattress plate.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Right.
Mr. Warlick: Well, they had collected more in the canal then they had in the pile. So while I was up there, we had to acknowledge to AEC we had lost count of our slugs.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet that wasn’t pleasant, was it? [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: Well, I was laughing. Nobody else was. [laughter] So then I spent two years operating the work order control. I was part of Engineering and when work orders came in, I had several things I had to concern myself about, how to account for them and what to charge them to. And I had a crew of three people doing my work there. After I’d been there two years, Logan Emerlet, have you ever heard of him?
Mr. McDaniel: Uh-huhn, sure have.
Mr. Warlick: Friend of mine. Passed the word that a committee had reviewed employees and decided that I was underemployed, and so I transferred to the Chemistry Division to handle their budget. I stayed there for seven or eight years and the Reactor Chemistry Division was established in Y-12 to establish chemistry for the Homogeneous Reactor and the Molten Salt Reactor. Well, the Director, Warren Grimes, needed an administrative assistant. Back in those days, secretaries were ‘secretaries’ and administrative assistants were –
Mr. McDaniel: Were executives, right.
Mr. Warlick: And so I was sort of promoted to that job.
Mr. McDaniel: You were kind of a deputy, weren’t you, what they would call a deputy now?
Mr. Warlick: I think I would call it ‘executive administrative assistant.’ But anyway, Warren was a great scientist, great person, but he didn’t like the administrative matters too well and so he respected me. He took care of the technical end of the business and I took care of the administrative end, budgeting, employees, and all that. So I stayed there until 1972.
Mr. McDaniel: And by this time it was Union Carbide, is that correct?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah. Well – yeah. It became Union Carbide –
Mr. McDaniel: Early on, right, after the War?
Mr. Warlick: Back in January, 1948.
Mr. McDaniel: Right after the war, sure.
Mr. Warlick: Have you ever seen that poem, the scientists wrote that?
Mr. McDaniel: I don’t know. I don’t know that I have. I don’t think so.
Mr. Warlick: It starts out, “Deck the pile with garlands dreary, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, AEC has screwed us clearly, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, when the pile’s been fully draped, we’ll know that we’ve been raped.” Have you ever seen Alvin Weinberg’s technocrat book? Memoirs of a Technocrat.
Mr. McDaniel: No, I’ve never read that.
Mr. Warlick: Well, he has the whole poem and he has expletive words in it.
Mr. McDaniel: I understand.
Mr. Warlick: Okay, back – I moved to Reactor Chemistry in ’59 and I really thoroughly enjoyed that work, most of anything. I was managing that division. I really enjoyed managing. That was personnel. That was a diversion. I really got into managing. In ’72 we had been told to cancel the Molten Salt Reactor and so Chemistry Division was about to fold up. But before it did, Warren came in one day and handed me a sheet of paper and it was a job description from Don Trauger who was the Associate Director of the Laboratory and I read that and I looked at it twice and said, you know, “Warren, you know, I think I might apply for that job.” Trauger told me later, “It’s a good thing you did because I wrote it with you in mind.”
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] That’s good.
Mr. Warlick: So I transferred to Don Trauger and I was a natural manager. I was on his staff first and then the Budget Department was created and we, all of us fellows, were transferred into that department. But I was Finance Manager for all of Trauger’s divisions and programs. Now, I don’t know if you know about –
Mr. McDaniel: Now, was that at the Lab?
Mr. Warlick: At the Lab. I don’t know if you know the way we were organized or not. We had divisions: Chemistry Division, Physics Division, Metals and Ceramics, Engineering Technology, and so forth. These divisions had a director and group leaders. They had a full staff of people but no money. We also had programs: had the LMFBR [Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor] Program, the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] Program, the MSR [Molten Salt Reactor] Program. These programs consisted of a program director and his secretary and money. So these program directors contracted to the various divisions to do their work. Now all the money that came from AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] or ERDA [Energy Research and Development Administration] or whatever was highly coded with nine digit codes, and if we assigned money to a division they’d have a department or a group with that code. So I had a lot of code work to do.
Mr. McDaniel: How did you do that? Did you have computers?
Mr. Warlick: Just memorize. Just worked with it every day for ten years and you – Trauger did tell my wife that I was a pretty good man of numbers.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, well, that’s good. [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: So then in 1985, I planned to retire. I planned to retire in May because our budget cycle, we had to start the budget cycle in December, big job in December, and then make the proposals to Congress or to headquarters, and [in] May we were through. And so I decided to retire in May. In February I had taken my wife to Florida to stay with her mother for a while. I came back, and on Sunday afternoon, I went to the Laboratory to look over things before Monday started, and one of my peers came in and said, “Did you hear about Herb?” Herb Beckler was our department supervisor. “No, what about him?” “Well, they’ve deducted he has cancer all through his – and he was never going to come back. Well, under those circumstances, you can’t ask a guy is he going to come back or when he’s going to come back, because you know he’s never going to, but you can’t say, “We think you ought to resign.” We kept him on the roll and they agreed for me – I had my successor selected, and I had him come on in, and I took over for Herb as an Acting – you know, if you’re Acting, that means you might act so long. Herb finally died in August, and at that point they assigned one of my peers to succeed him. They had a voluntary reduction in force aimed for 30th of September which was about a month or six weeks off. Well, if I could do that, it’d be rewarding to me financially, so I rolled a lot of this stuff up while I was killing time, and so then I retired and came here. Now, you asked me about my family. Jenny came to Oak Ridge and we had a son about ten months after we got married. At that point, I went to work for Clinton Laboratory and I was eligible for a cemesto. So we moved up on Michigan Avenue to an “A” model and we lived there for four or five years and when our third child was on the way, we had another son. Now the first son, George the III, we called him ‘Biff,’ is a retired accountant from Pellissippi State. Second son, Daniel, is a very eminent lawyer in Nashville. And the third was a daughter and she is now on the faculty at University of Notre Dame, as is her husband, and they live in South Bend. They all came in last Sunday. I threw them a party for my birthday, 90th birthday. When she was on the way, we got a three-bedroom house in Woodland, one of those flattop concrete block houses. Well, come along in 1952, we learned this house was available. We came out and looked at it and bought it. So we’ve lived in Kingston ever since.
Mr. McDaniel: Ever since, huhn? I bet that “A” was getting a little crowded with two little boys running around, wasn’t it?
Mr. Warlick: Yeah. Now, while I was in Oak Ridge, I had a couple other – I helped start the Community Chest and I served as President one year, now known as United Way. I was Chairman of the Tennessee Boy Scout – what do they call it – not a council but the Region. And we helped build the first treasury in church and taught Sunday school there. So we had some activities in Oak Ridge. When we came to Kingston, we sensed – we were in the vanguard of a huge entourage from Oak Ridge, and we sensed there was some resentment of the old timers about us newcomers come to –
Mr. McDaniel: Kingston, right.
Mr. Warlick: And so I sort of laid low for a year. Now, I had belonged to the Rotary Club in Oak Ridge from 1948 to 1952. When we moved to Kingston, I continued to belong to that because it was a noon club and I worked in Oak Ridge during the daytime. Well, in 1954, we got around to organizing the Oak Ridge Community Chest. That was interesting in a way. One of the reasons for organizing it was that the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were raising pathetic amounts of money out here and – have you ever heard of the Daniel Arthur Center?
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, of course.
Mr. Warlick: The Lions Club here had donated money to buy them a station wagon to carry people from their places over in Oak Ridge. First it was in Clinton and then to Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Was it the Emory Valley Center?
Mr. Warlick: That’s where it was located. Anyway, also there were about two thousand people in Roane County that worked at Carbide and I knew that Carbide persuaded its employees to contribute. I remember one time I was Chairman of the Laboratory one year and the director of the Laboratory was encouraging people to give and towards the end of the campaign we were seventy dollars short. He called seven division directors and said, “Send me ten dollars; we’re going to make our goal.” So I knew that Carbide really encouraged employees and so people in Roane County who worked at the Lab were paying for the Oak Ridge Community Chest, not without some resentment. So we organized the Roane County – the Kingston Rotary Club organized the Community Chest. So I went over to K-25 to see Tom Lane. You’ve heard of Tom Lane?
Mr. McDaniel: Mhm.
Mr. Warlick: Tom and I were friends from Rotary and other works, and he said, “Now if at the present time an employee wants to contribute through the company, he can sign a pledge and the company would take it out of your pay check and give it to Oak Ridge Community Chest.” I said, “Kingston would like to have the same privilege.” We figured if whatever the two thousand people out here were giving to Oak Ridge, under some encouragement, would give to us. He said, “I’m sorry, George. If I go to Kingston, then I’ve got to go to Clinton, Lenoir City, Oliver Springs, and Rockwood, and we don’t have a computer yet.” He didn’t say that. “The bookkeeping is too much detail for our clerks to handle.” Well, I came back thinking about it, and about that time some people from Harriman and Rockwood – I guess their Rotary Clubs – approached me and said, “I understand you’re talking about a Community Chest for Kingston. How about making it for Roane County?” “That’s a good idea. We’ll go back to Tom and say the whole county, not the individual towns.” Well, in the meantime, in our organization, we had had the foresight to include Tanya Sutter who was wife of Clark Sutter, Carbide President, and Oral Reinhardt from Kingston who was fiscal manager for K-25. So Oral and I approached Tom. He says, “I know when I’ve been cornered.” And so they permitted Roane County people to designate their contributions to go to the Roane County Chamber of Commerce. Couple of interesting things happened then. The first year, there were people in Knoxville who also resented contributing to the Oak Ridge Community Chest contributing to Roane County.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mr. Warlick: And the next year Carbide accepted the Knox County Community Chest. We had Roane County Community Chest, not just the city, and somewhere along the way Knoxville Community Chest expanded to Knox County and the Oak Ridge Community Chest, which I had expanded to the Anderson County Community Chest. So I was part of the Roane County Community Chest for over twenty or thirty years, I guess, Treasurer, almost account manager at times, but I retired from that. In ’55, as I said, we organized the Kingston Rotary Club and so I have been active in that. I was Charter President and then Treasurer for years and years and presently still Treasurer.
Mr. McDaniel: Where did you meet? Did you meet at the Hut?
Mr. Warlick: We started off at Ellis Diner. Now you’ve never heard of that, but it’s on a dyke down there. You know where the Boy Scouts have their Christmas trees?
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure.
Mr. Warlick: Well, there was a little restaurant there.
Mr. McDaniel: There was a little restaurant right down there at what they call the gravel pit now.
Mr. Warlick: Yeah, but it wasn’t then.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mr. Warlick: Well, they closed up and we went to David’s Diner in Midtown. And they closed up and we came to, oh, I think there’s a restaurant in the basement of what’s now Eduardo’s.
Mr. McDaniel: I don’t know where that is.
Mr. Warlick: Mexican place down here at the end of the road beside the brewery.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh ,yeah, sure.
Mr. Warlick: We joked that we have closed up more restaurants.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: Right now we’re meeting with two chefs which is across the street from Mamma Mia’s.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. I know where that is. So you didn’t ever meet at the Hut downtown?
Mr. Warlick: Oh, yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, yeah, that’s what I was about to say. You met at the Hut.
Mr. Warlick: We met upstairs for a while until some of the members couldn’t climb the stairs and then we met downstairs.
Mr. McDaniel: You know, it’s interesting, when I was in high school, I sang. I sang, played guitar, and sang, and my senior year in high school, two nights a week, I would go in and play my guitar and sing at the Hut during dinner time for ten dollars and dinner for a night. I thought that was a pretty good gig.
Mr. Warlick: We’ve belonged to the Presbyterian Church since we’ve been here. I sang in the choir for a while. I was a member of the Board of Trustees a couple times. I taught a Sunday School class for about ten years. I believe that’s –
Mr. McDaniel: Is that it, so far?
Mr. Warlick: My story of Kingston and Oak Ridge –
Mr. McDaniel: Well, good. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Anything else you want to mention? We’ve got time if you want to.
Mr. Warlick: I have pages and pages of anecdotes that I – one of my funny things I remember, when I was gofer for the Executive Director, I had to handle arrangements for moving members and one of my tasks was – Alvin Weinberg was Research Director and Mike Murphy, Major Mike Murphy, was Assistant. Well, there was a building down in the middle of the campus there I call the training school, two story frame, and so they decided to move them there. So I moved them. Now, Mike Murphy’s secretary was Elizabeth Richardson. She was a very strong personality.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mr. Warlick: Equally forceful approach. Well, later when Alvin’s secretary by the name of Nina Croupoff resigned, she was promoted to be Alvin’s secretary. But before that, the day we moved them in down there – have you ever seen one of those three-way plugs we had back in those days? Now, it’s not like that now. It was like that.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, sure, yes.
Mr. Warlick: Well, Mike insisted I give him two telephones so they could talk to Washington and San Francisco at the same time. Also, he and Elizabeth wanted to have buzzers, that he could buzz her and she could buzz him. Well, it took all day to get them moved in. Now, at that time, the prize for secretaries was an electric typewriter. You had to claim that you had to type, make seven carbon copies, but anyway, Elizabeth got one of the first electric typewriters. When we left, the telephone men were still there and they were installing the buzzers. Well, they had to hook a transformer in. They had no plugs to fit those three-way things that we had, so they looked around to where they could find one. Guess what they saw?
Mr. McDaniel: What?
Mr. Warlick: Elizabeth’s typewriter.
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter] Oh, my.
Mr. Warlick: So they cut it off and installed their buzzers and went home. The next morning I was hardly in my desk when the telephone began [ringing]. Elizabeth says, “Who cut the plugs off of my typewriter?”
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness.
Mr. Warlick: I said, I don’t know but I’ll get you one real quick. I called the Electrical Department and they were up there –
Mr. McDaniel: I bet. Oh, my goodness. Well, Mr. Warlick, we sure do appreciate you taking time to talk with us. You’ve had a long, illustrious career in Oak Ridge and Kingston and we appreciate it. I learned a lot of new stuff today, things that I had not known before, so we appreciate you taking time to talk to us.
Mr. Warlick: I think about it a whole lot too. When you get as old as I am, you have too many memories.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, I understand. Well, thank you so much.
Mr. Warlick: You’re welcome.
[end of recording]